Canada's most syndicated newspaper, the National Post, published an overwhelmingly positive review of the infamously racist novel Camp of the Saints today. The book is a standard in white nationalist book lists and is nearly only sold by white supremacist publishers. nationalpost.com/opinion/jami...
I wander back into the Vibecession debate, which have been bubbling up recently.
I also share one of the more concerned looks I've gotten from a comms person over my take for a reporter, which is saying something. newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/is-the-vib...
Earlier this week I was giving an update to some donors and said something that totally shocked them and made me realize those who aren’t literally in healthcare have no idea how truly unstable it all is: I get at least 3 emails a day offering my clinic medium to large lines of credit.
A thread…
The fundamental protocols of the internet were democratic—TCP/IP didn't care who you were. But artificial intelligence is designed to care, writes Konstantinos Komaitis. He says AI is a technology built to make democratic agency obsolete.
*ad hominem
What's the criteria for inclusion? I have a lot of policy positions that line up with being on the blocklist but try not to practice and hominem and enjoy learning from smart pro-AI accounts.
Scissors.
Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as "go meta," in his 2022 book *Survival of the Richest*:
pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/c...
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NEW: I've been shocked by some of the numbers I've been seeing on behind-the-meter power plants for data centers, so I did a little math.
less than a dozen gas plants being built to power data centers for big tech companies could emit a maximum of nearly 130 million tons of CO2e each year (!)
I've been asking recently how many Senate seats we get with a 25 percent approval rating Trump. What about a 15 percent. Etc
His ability to threaten people with prison in favor of this would be helpfully limited if we explicitly committed to immediate pardon and full lawsuit style restitution for all his prosecutorial attempts
According to the article he handed over a bunch of assets. It's ok to be bummed it wasn't more but I think going through something like that is pretty unpleasant. A lot of autonomy loss.
You're laughing but this is literally the gold standard in political science for reaching mutual agreements to forswear useful but terrible tactics. When and why did the US stop using nuclear weapons in interstate conflict
Coalitions tearing apart over trust, symbolism priorities and tolerance of Kevin Bacon association credits
This vision as described lines up pretty well with the @bafriedman.bsky.social critique of Status Quo Dem NatSec thought, while mildly pushing back against it bsky.app/profile/bafr...
(b) INSTRUCTIONS.— (1) COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY.— The Committee on Homeland Security shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction that increase the deficit by not more than $70,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2026 through 2035. (2) COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY.—The Committee on the Judiciary shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction that increase the deficit by not more than $70,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2026 through 2035.
After Minneapolis, Dems refused to fund DHS in 2026 without human rights reforms to ICE and Border Patrol.
Instead, Repubs plan to fund ICE and BP, unreformed, for 10 years. Using a special rule for a party-line, simple majority vote.
🚨The bill has dropped: www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/new...
!!
The apparent theory here--SPLC was defrauding donors by paying right-wing extremist org informants, and also took completely legal steps for obscuring the money trail for very obvious reasons on this totally legal thing to do--is ludicrous even by the notoriously malleable standard for wire fraud.
1/ Russian companies are blocking foreign IP addresses en masse in a bid to block VPNs, stranding thousands of Russians abroad without access to money, flight details, or taxes. Major Russian apps are also being repurposed to scan users' phones for VPNs and secretly obtain user data. ⬇️
I need political scientists to tell me how many Senate seats we get when he hits 11% approval
And that doesn't even cover what I would have called black swan events where he creates an even bigger disaster out of panic btw now and November. I'm not sure I can call them black swan events now so much as, like, any given Tuesday, but another one goes off the charts for impact like the Iran one.
What about 25% approval? Because my understanding of the macroeconomics is that the macro experience in the US is going to get *significantly* worse over the summer, pretty much no matter what, and it could get *more* than significantly worse.
W/ respect to all, concern about the relative role of humans and the changes in the "dependency upon humans" parameter value in the kill chain of organized warfare is an important and valid concern, and the human repulsive instinct to and psychological damage from mass violence is a real constraint.
Chad's forces were key to Sahel counterinsurgency missions in the 2010s, but they've since pulled back amid heightened and interlinked security challenges at home and in Sudan.
Since then Chad has flirted with Russia. Assuming this is a message to the US, it's an interesting development.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTTX...
Wonderful reporting.
We learn these important insights for free and then they slowly disappear from our minds over time. It's all fixable, but hard to imagine how and when, and who will care enough.
Awful.
This is part of a broader push the Trump admin began in term one (that Biden didn't roll back in any way). First each visa applicant had to disclose your social media handles. Now under Trump 2, the U.S. government demands that you make your social media accounts public so they can scan 'em.
'Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content.' 1/3